News and stories from data mining research in Aalto

Author: Eric

We did – in our paper titled “Beyond rankings: comparing directed acyclic graphs” (pdf) which I’ll be presenting at the ECML PKDD conference in Portugal next month. This was the first project of my PhD, but there’s also something else that makes it fundamentally different from the other research projects I’ve been involved with.

Typically, when I undertake a research project, I have a concrete question, like what is the next location a person will visit, to which I start looking for different solutions. In other words, I begin with a nail and start looking for a suitable hammer. However, this time we started by developing a cool new hammer with some neat theoretical properties before we had any idea if a suitable nail even exists.

Last Monday night, I posted to my personal blog a small study where I analyse the lyrics of Finnish hip-hop artists. By Tuesday night, the post had attracted over 32,000 page views, severalonlinenewspapers had reported about it, and I had given an interview to a national radio station. In this post, I will give a brief summary of what all the fuss was about. Continue reading →